Here in New england

BOSTON — A discount bus service operating between Boston and New York City’s Chinatown had to pull its entire fleet off the road for safety inspections ordered by federal officials.

Tuesday’s order by the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration came after Massachusetts officials found serious problems including cracked frames with eight Fung Wah buses.

The company had already agreed to take 21 buses off the road but the order removed all 28 from service. By late Tuesday afternoon Massachusetts officials said three buses from Fung Wah’s fleet had passed inspection and returned to service. The company also chartered other buses. Attempts to get comment from Fung Wah on Tuesday were not successful.

Fung Wah has a history of troubles, including a $31,100 fine for safety violations linked to a 2006 rollover in Auburn that injured dozens of passengers. In 2005, flames engulfed a Fung Wah bus moments after passengers were evacuated in Meriden, Conn.

CAMBRIDGE — Sean Penn remembers smelling dead bodies when he arrived in Haiti after the earthquake.

But now there’s music in those same streets, even as the country still faces many years of rebuilding, the Academy Award-winning actor says.

Penn said “extraordinary” changes have happened since the January 2010 natural disaster killed more than 300,000 people and left about 1.5 million homeless. He spoke in a Tuesday evening forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

The actor is an ambassador-at-large for Haiti’s president and CEO of an aid group.

It started with a goal of bringing painkillers to victims and became an agency that manages a camp for displaced people and works to resettle them.

Former Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis and Ken Keen, the Army official who commanded the U.S. military relief effort in Haiti, joined Penn as panelists.